New mobile devices, such as mobile phones, smartphones and tablets appear on the market regularly. Additionally new versions of existing mobile devices are also frequently released (e.g. having new or updated hardware and/or software). These new mobile device models and versions can be expected to have certain characteristics and capabilities in terms of their ability to perform location related measurements. Obtaining location related measurements by a mobile device and computing a location of a mobile device either by the mobile device or at another entity such as a location server may be important or even critical to some applications and services such as navigation, direction finding and emergency calls. The characteristics and capabilities of a mobile device related to positioning support may include the accuracy of the different measurements and certain limitations and possible faults. In addition, some measurements like received signal strength indication (RSSI), signal round trip propagation time (RTT), signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) and inter-frequency Reference Signal Time Difference (RSTD) may require recalibration to accurately address measurement errors and measurement differences for different mobile device models.
The ability to provide an international mobile station equipment identity (IMEI) or electronic serial number (ESN) to a location server was added to some control plane (CP) location standards such as CP location solutions defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). This can enable a location server to infer certain aspects of a mobile device, such as a model and vendor, from these identifiers. This may enable a location server to infer certain positioning characteristics of a mobile device and thereby assist in the positioning of the mobile device. However, this approach is limited because it may not address different versions of the same phone model, and it depends on being able to preconfigure a database at, or accessible to, the location server to enable the location server to derive such information from mobile device identifiers. In such configurations, the location server may not be able to adapt positioning method support and/or other services to new mobile devices with identifiers the database or location server is not yet configured to support.